{"id":34,"date":"2012-03-31T15:36:34","date_gmt":"2012-03-31T15:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/?p=34"},"modified":"2012-03-31T15:36:34","modified_gmt":"2012-03-31T15:36:34","slug":"oh-adobe-what-have-you-done","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/?p=34","title":{"rendered":"Oh Adobe &#8211; What Have You Done&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>So Adobe just released a new update for Flash Player, and also seems to have started pushing scareware&#8230;<\/strong><br \/>\n<!--more --><\/p>\n<p>\nFlash is a very good attack vector for most bad guys to attack us through, first of all it is one of the most common pieces of third party software and I am forever seeing that most <i>every day computer users<\/i> seem to not keep their software up to date.  This means that security vulnerabilities which are well known &#8211; and have been for months &#8211; have not been patched on said users&#8217; machine; and can potentially end up leading to huge problems.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe latest critical update for Adobe Flash Player solved this problem by introducing an automatic update facility &#8211; hoorah!  However, Adobe also started pushing scareware on it&#8217;s manual update page &#8211; bad times \ud83d\ude41\n<\/p>\n<p>\nYou can read more on this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/blog\/bott\/adobes-latest-critical-security-update-pushes-scareware\/4681\">here<\/a> where the following points are highlighted:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The &#8220;free PC health check&#8221; identifies a huge number of issues with your system &#8211; even on a clean install of Windows 7<\/li>\n<li>The system does highlight some security vulnerabilities &#8211; however it did not identify that certain software was not up to date (as I said earlier a huge security vulnerability)<\/li>\n<li>The software also identifies registry errors &#8211; the author states that &#8220;<i>&#8230;..[registry cleaners] they should never be allowed in the hands of anyone but an expert PC diagnostician<\/i>&#8221; and I must say I am inclined to agree with him<\/li>\n<li>Once these so called <i>errors<\/i> have been identified &#8211; you need to pay for them to be fixed!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\nThe scareware pushed out is produced by Iolo Technologies &#8211; some reviews of their products can be found <a href=\"\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/article2\/0,2817,2371043,00.asp?tab=Reviews\">here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe author of the article linked to above does state the Iolo Technologies is a legitimate company, and does not install any Adware or malicious software, however as you can see from the reviews the software is hardly mind-blowing &#8211; and this is possibly their only crime, bad software.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nIn conclusion <strong>do the security update for Flash Player, but don&#8217;t waste your time with the free check up!<\/strong>.  If you already did &#8211; don&#8217;t worry this software doesn&#8217;t appear to be malicious &#8211; just not very good!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So Adobe just released a new update for Flash Player, and also seems to have started pushing scareware&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[16,18,17],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing-news","tag-adobe","tag-flash-player","tag-scareware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36,"href":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andrewpleasants.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}